Democracy Today.indb - Universidade do Minho

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DEMOCRACY TODAY
can be a personality and govern one’s own life, while being able to follow
one’s own mind, in Kant’s famous words, and not trying to relieve
oneself of that burden in favor of some elected representatives and/or
parties. The cultural development of human personality is the key to
achieving a democracy in society – as Maxim Gorkiy used to note in
turbulent times of the Great Russian 1917 revolution, democracy is a
phenomenon of culture, and not of politics nor of economy [Gorkiy, 1995].
That means that democracy now depends on (and is now to develop)
inner human qualities rather than external social and political institutions
like those of state government. Indeed, it is representative
democracy that is found to be less possible under present-day situation.
Representation is a form of (strictly speaking) democracy-oligarchy
enabled by a low-level development of personalities represented – so
that their social and political interests could be quite easily expressed
and delegated. On the contrary, educated and culturally developed
human personalities have political interests and preferences so vast
and complex that they are nearly impossible to be represented by any
other person different from the one whose interests and preferences
we are talking about here. Complexity in interests means concretization:
each specific case is unique for each specific human person, so
his or her interests and his/her power as ability to feel, to think and
to act under concrete situation could no longer be alienated towards
a – presumably even more competent and/or educated – representative
as a ‘professional politician’.
Indeed, we believe that the future development of democracy
under globalization lies not so in the disappearance of politics, as in
its losing its status of a specific profession, – as well as not in the disappearance
of nation-states, as in them losing their exclusive quality of
being the arena and the embodiment of political and social human life.
State, as predicted by Friedrich Engels more than a hundred years
ago, is being replaced by Gemeinwesen, that is – by ‘a commonwealth
of communities’, with each personality participating in activities of
different self-organized communities, holding ‘power’ authority positions
basing on his or her imminent competence in the relevant practice,
the dichotomy of private/public sphere obviously losing its relevance.
The power as the ability to act and to create, as opposed to power as
dominance, and politics as an activity of exercising the said power,